I don’t know if it is the quickness of youth, or if my daughter is just way better at performing than I am, but she can really memorize, and in almost no time at all! I know this, because she keeps asking me to do lines with her. I try to tell her that we in the business call it “running lines,” and not “doing lines,” which is another thing entirely, but she does what she wants. So we do lines together.
She has lines to do, because she is in a play. Her camp this week is a theater camp, and tomorrow evening they will be performing “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” but not the Disney version, as she keeps reminding me. They have been working since Monday, although they didn’t even know what parts they were playing until Tuesday, and she told me that yesterday they didn’t even work on her scenes. So I am guessing that she has maybe gone through her stuff a total of once, and she already has the thing off book. 15 lines, and she’s got them down cold. I, on the other hand, am trying to memorize an opera, for which I am being paid, and I have memorized exactly zero lines. She is way ahead of me.
We ran did the lines a few times today before she left for camp, and really there was only one spot that she kept forgetting, but after one quick script review she had that fixed too. My presence was superfluous. I think we were just doing it for fun, or because she likes doing things with me. And that was nice. Because I was only doing it because I like doing things with her too. She’s going to be great tomorrow night, as the prince, and she will know all of her lines. And I will too, because I helped her learn them. Except I’ve already forgotten them. And she knew them all along.